RELIGION
individual tendency to endow the Divinity with attributes
derived from the parents is greatly stimulated and reinforced
by the suggestive power of religious tradition, working through
the channels of direct teaching or of representation in language,
literature and art
The correspondence between the divine and the human Remoter
parent is one that, lor these reasons among others, is very
deeply rooted in the human mind. In an advanced stage of
culture it may find its most natural expression in the related
concepts of an ultimate and an immediate creator respectively,
but at a more primitive mental level it is usually brought into
connection with the distinction between remoter ancestors and
immediate parents. There can be no doubt that the most
important aspects of the theory and practice of religion are
very largely derived from, and influenced by, ancestor worship,
even though they may not, as Herbert Spencer has contended1;'
have entirely originated from this source. Granted the
fundamental assumption of animism—the existence of an indi-
vidual soul or spirit which is to some extent independent of
the body and may survive bodily death—it becomes easy to
attribute to one's dead parents or to one's remoter ancestors
powers that exceed those of persons who are still alive. There
is not, as in the case of the livingr any obvious and well
defined limit to their capacity, and it becomes possible there-
fore to displace freely on to them the exaggerated notions
which it is no longer possible to hold with regard to parents
who are still subject to the conditions of earthly existence.
The tendency which thus arises is reinforced by the very
general fear of the dead2, which easily attributes to its objects
an exaggerated power—especially for evil. The more remote
* " Principles of Sociology." Vol. I.
2 A fear which, as modern psychological knowledge seems to show,
is largely the result of the guilty conscience of the living; the feelings of
hostility (including of course death wishes) which the living had ex-
perienced towards the dead during their lifetime being projected on to
the dead (in accordance with the now familiar mechanism, which can be
studied most clearly in psychopathological disorders such as Paranoia;
cp, above pp. 116,130); as a result of which the dead are conceived as being
on the whole evilly disposed towards the living and consequently to be
feared. Hence the very general fear of ghosts. Cp. Freud, "Totem and
Taboo," 88 ff.